


Trembling, Shivering Star

by memento_muri



Category: Touhou Project
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 20:10:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19047529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memento_muri/pseuds/memento_muri
Summary: This story takes place after the events of Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, and before Sanae's legacy mode (with misses) ending.Sanae attempts to face Junko by herself and is almost killed, but is saved by Reimu and brought home. Kanako and Suwako spend the rest of the night watching over her, and struggle to come to terms with the girl's mortality.Meanwhile, somebody on a distant star tries to remember something.Inspired by Onsen Project's '星の海.'





	Trembling, Shivering Star

_“You owe me big for this one.”_

The Hakurei shrine maiden let out an exhausted sigh as she dropped Sanae into Kanako’s arms. Midsummer leaves fell from the trees around the shrine onto patches of lifeless, purified earth. The rabbits’ invasion had only lasted until the two girls left for the moon that morning, but not even the mountain’s myriad gods could say when the scars left on their home would begin to heal.

_“She really could have died, you know?”_

* * *

 

Sanae had got into trouble plenty of times before. In the outside world, it hadn’t been uncommon for her to come home crying. One day, she must have bawled out her eyes so much that she couldn’t even fit her key into the door, and when Kanako opened it and the girl crashed into her arms, she saw that it was because the frog hairclip she had gotten as a birthday gift from Suwako had broken in half.

But back then, the two goddesses had always been able to cheer her up some way or another. When she locked herself in her room, Kanako would cook her favourite for dinner that night and welcome her with a hug when she crept into the kitchen. When she wouldn’t stop crying, Suwako would pull silly faces until she managed to get a stifled laugh out of her.

Sanae had always been a strong girl, and she’d become so much stronger after coming to Gensokyo. A few weeks after they moved, Sanae, who was usually quiet, came home and talked about her new friends all throughout the evening. She loved Gensokyo’s eccentric people, and found such wonder in its fantastical stories and the brightness of its night sky, but Kanako thought that the girl before her was the brightest star she had ever seen in her long life. It was as if she had grown up in the blink of an eye.

But along with pride, that thought set loose a fear in Kanako’s heart she thought she had buried long ago. As surely as the leaves wither and fall each Autumn, all humans, no matter how strong, grow frail, and no matter how beloved they are by the gods, one day pass from this world to the next. A single lifetime would never be enough time for Kanako to prepare herself to say goodbye to Sanae. There were still so many more things she wanted so show her, so many more times she wanted to see her smile, so many more memories to make so that she could hold onto a part of her even when she was gone. Their time together would have already been cut bitterly short had Reimu not been with her, and that reminder of Sanae's fragility left Kanako helplessly anxious.

* * *

 

“… and that whole affair with the Taoists a few years ago! If she can already beat hermits by herself, there’s no way a few rabbit foot soldiers should be able to put up a fight. They must have played dirty somehow. You think so too, right, Suwa?”

Suwako had been forced into Kanako’s lap the moment she stepped into Sanae’s room to check on her. Her hat had been knocked off during the struggle, and Kanako now rested her chin atop the smaller goddess’s head, arms wrapped around her torso in a constricting hug. Suwako sat perfectly still. Once Kanako got like this, there was no escape; she must have been held captive a hundred times before she learned to accept her fate.

“Mm… You know, I got the rundown from Reimu while you were taking Sanae in. Turns out the rabbits were just the start of it. The one behind the whole thing was some weirdo who had no idea what spellcards even are.”

“I knew it!” Kanako hissed through gritted teeth.

“Geh—!” Suwako’s eyes bulged as her ribs were crushed by Kanako’s embrace.

“—Ah. Forgive me, I…” The room fell silent for a few moments, then Kanako sighed. “I knew it was wrong of me to let her go this time. If Reimu hadn’t been with her, then…”

“Come on, don’t beat yourself up like that. Even if we could have known how serious this would end up being, something tells me Sanae wouldn’t just sit around while all her friends went and dealt with it. She practically spends more time at their shrine than ours nowadays anyway. She’s not a kid anymore.”

Kanako’s breath hitched at Suwako’s words, and her grip tightened, just a little bit.

“We can’t protect her forever,” Suwako went on, letting out a resigned sigh. “You know how it goes with mortals.”

The tension escaped from Kanako’s body along with a sigh of her own, and she went limp around Suwako, who felt the slow creep of senstation finally returning to her limbs. The two goddesses remained huddled together a while longer, soaking up each other’s warmth in silence and listening to the birds outside as they began their work for the morning.

“… I suppose I should get started too.” Kanako mumbled, reluctantly disentangling herself from her partner.

“On what?” Suwako stood up and stretched her arms.

Kanako began to walk toward the shrine's entrance. But before she passed through the door to Sanae’s room, she turned to take one last look at the girl resting in her bed, and Suwako sat beside her. She closed her eyes and tried with all her might to press the feeling of Suwako’s lingering warmth into her heart, along with the memories of these precious days the three of them spent together as a family. She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes again.

“If Sanae doesn’t want us protecting her anymore, I’ll at least have her show me she’s capable of protecting herself!” Suwako couldn’t help but laugh seeing her partner back in her usual spirits.

 _You’re hopeless_ , she thought to herself, waving her goodbye and turning back to look at Sanae’s sleeping face. _Good thing you two found each other_.

* * *

 

Sanae usually never missed dinner for anything, so when the sun set and she still wasn’t home from the moon, Kanako had been so worried that she couldn’t sleep. Suwako said everything would be fine, and she believed her. She waited outside the shrine all night anyway though, looking up to the moon in the hopes of seeing the two girls come home any minute.

At the same time, underneath a faraway sky, a woman who had forgotten her name long ago stared blankly up at the Earth. Two small lights had fallen from that distant planet onto the moon some time ago, but time had long since lost all meaning to her, so she couldn’t say when. Those lights reminded her of something, though. Of a faraway night when a single star had fallen from the sky, and a woman had run along the shore to try to catch it.

She made that star herself, long ago. She raised it with all of her love, and when it came time to set it into the sky, she cried with all of her sorrow. But after seeing it shining so brightly in the night sky, she didn’t feel so lonely anymore.

When she finally reached her star, trembling in the sand, she could hardly recognize it. Hundreds of fireflies huddled gently around it, not wishing to see its light fade. But all the fireflies in the world could do nothing about the arrow which had pierced the star and sent it falling down to the earth. It looked as if the slightest breeze would send it blowing away, and she was afraid that if she touched it, it would slip through her fingers and disappear forever, but she picked it up and held it close to her anyway, and thought of all the times she had done this before. Her star had been such a small thing before, and when it fell over she would hold it just like this and sing to it until it stopped shaking.

She couldn’t hold back her tears any longer, but she didn’t want her little star to worry about her, so she blamed it on the wind.

She tried closing her eyes. Maybe if she did, she thought, she could stop this moment from ever passing. She didn’t want to ever let go of the fading warmth in her arms. She didn’t want to say goodbye.

So she burned the night sky into her eyes. The sky that they had once looked up at together, the constellation now missing its brightest star, the moon and the blue ocean that reflected it all. So that she would never forget this feeling.

The night sky was washed clean come morning, and after countless more mornings the stars held deep within the woman’s heart slowly began to fade, one by one.

Thousands and thousands more mornings came and left, and took with them the memories of what she had lost. But her sorrow endured, twisted by lifetimes spent staring at the night sky into a bottomless resentment for the moon, which remained even after she closed her eyes and could no longer see the stars.

_“So you’re the one invading the lunar capital!”_

A voice called out to her, but it had been so long since she heard any sound other than the ocean, she could hardly even understand what was being said.

 _“Come, let us do battle!”_ The voice belonged to a lone girl with constellations sewn into her skirt.

The battle was decided in a heartbeat. But before the noisy girl could fall into the water below, the woman caught her without thinking, and remembered that her name was Junko.

The warmth in her arms felt so familiar. In that moment, eyes fixed on the stars shimmering in the ocean, she felt that she had surely forgotten something very important.

**Author's Note:**

> Nice to meet you. It's a cloudy night, and I live in the city, so I can't see the stars. I still remember what they look like though, I think.
> 
> I really love Junko's danmaku philosophy. She's clearly not concerned with aesthetics at all, she just single-mindedly tries to pin you down and kill you. Her patterns are so intense that after progressing through most of the game with Sanae, I ended up having to switch to Reimu since I felt half of her attacks would be impossible unless I had Reimu's small hitbox. That's actually part of what inspired me to write this, imagining Sanae defeated by Junko only for Reimu to step in and save the day like she always does (in my case, it's still a work in progress, though...)
> 
> Anyway, this story was also inspired by Onsen Project's '星の海,' from the album SUI-TEN. You can find the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgSIv-_LS08. I'd recommend supporting the circle and buying the album if you're able to, the rest of the songs are just as good.
> 
> You don't really get the full picture of how sad Junko's backstory is just from the game, but the omake.txt includes a line to the extent of 'Junko's grudge has been purified for so long that she no longer even needs to remember what started it in the first place.' I wanted to express the tragedy of Junko living for so long that she forgets about her son's death, and parallel that with Kanako having to accept that the same thing will happen to her with Sanae one day, but I don't think I did a very good job. Either way, I hope some of my feelings were able to make it through.
> 
> This is the first time I've written anything like this, and for all I know it could be the last time, so if you made it this far, thank you for reading. Our time on Earth is precious, so I'd be glad if you felt that the time you spent reading this was spent well.


End file.
